Summary of the week of August 30, 2021

cobito

Samsung changes the components of its SSDs

They caught Samsung changing TLC integrated circuits for QLC in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs. Recently, they caught Crucial and Western Digital doing the same thing.

Why cheating people is not a good idea

The practice of deceiving consumers by changing the characteristics of the storage device is not new. In this post, they explain how IBM shot itself in the foot by doing something similar.

New vulnerability in AMD processors

A Meltdown-style vulnerability has been found that affects Zen+ and Zen 2. AMD has said that it is easy to fix.

Samsung and Key Foundry will increase the price by 20%

Two of the major semiconductor manufacturers have decided to raise the price of their wafers by 20%.

IBM proposes a new cache philosophy

IBM wants to test a new concept in caches that consists of the level 2 cache (private for each core) being able to act as a level 3 cache (shared throughout the CPU).

kynes

The news about IBM's caches is very interesting. Surely the rest of the manufacturers will be eager to get their hands on one of the equipment to analyze the result, if it works well, we will surely see it in a few years in AMD and Intel processors for servers.

Regarding the prices of the components, taking into account that the machines necessary for advanced manufacturing processes are becoming more and more expensive, it is normal that they tend to rise, and we will stretch the devices more. I remember when at the university, in 98, the professor of the subject that explained the physics of semiconductors warned us that mosfets had only a few years left, and that miniaturization was going to be more and more complicated.

More exotic materials, more complex transistor designs and with more stages of manufacturing... all of that is going to make it complicated for us to return to the times of high-end graphics cards at 500€ and mid-range at 150-200€. I am very pessimistic about what is coming in the medium term in our hobby.